David kept his promise with difficulty. He was so nearly sure that Mary would be back that he wanted to share that hope with Ted and the children who had worn themselves out with indignation and self-pity and now simply drifted together disconsolately. At eight o’clock in the evening the phone rang, and fortunately Ted answered it. He listened, answered in one syllable, listened again, answered briefly. When he hung up the phone, he stood looking at it for a moment. Then he turned to his children.

‘I’m going to get your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s ready to come home.’

Their instinct to cheer with relief was checked by the permission their father had given them to feel hard done by.

‘Look,’ Ted said. ‘We’ve all been mad at her, but maybe she just had to do this, and anyway it’s over. So be sure you let her know you’re glad she’s home.’

When Ted had gone, David said, ‘Well, it’s time for me to go back down stairs.’

‘Grandad?’ Christine asked. ‘Will she be better?’

‘I think so,’ David said.

‘I’m still sort of mad at her,’ Tyler said.

‘We haven’t always been such perfect children,’ Patsy said, the most self-contained, the least apparently needy of the children.

‘Blaming anyone is … like …’ David looked at Christine before he used one of her favourite words, ‘boring.’

She laughed. The other two looked less certain of such a judgment.

‘Goodnight,’ David said, and he kissed each one, including his grandson.

David looked out at the pale sun of what was an early spring morning, a season in this climate which could easily tip back into winter, and the very fragility made it the more precious. The sap had begun to run in the bare alder and dogwood branches, from the rhododendrons, from the sticks of roses, and the lawn steamed marshily. Down the front path Mary strolled, stopping to greet snowdrops, the first of the crocuses, egg yolk yellow, the first pale yellow blooms on the forsythia. ‘Nature’s first green is gold,’ Patricia had said every spring when they walked together where Mary walked now. David was tempted to join his daughter but thought better of it. This was her second spring as mistress of this place, and, if she was finally going to make it her own, she must do it by herself without either his company or the ghost of her mother.